Richard Edward Taylor

Richard Edward Taylor
(1929)

Canadian physicist who in 1990 shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with
Jerome Friedman and Henry Kendall for his collaboration in proving the
existence of quarks, which are now generally accepted as being among
the basic building blocks of matter.
Taylor attended the University of Alberta, where he received his bachelor's
degree (1950) and his master's degree (1952). He received his doctorate
from Stanford University in 1962. He worked for a year at the University
of California's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and from 1962 to 1968
he was a staff member at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).

While at SLAC, he and Friedman and Kendall conducted the series of
experiments that confirmed the hypothesis that protons and neutrons
are made up of quarks. This discovery was crucial to the formulation
of the currently accepted theoretical description of matter and its
interactions, known as the standard model. Taylor became an associate
professor at Stanford in 1968 and a full professor in 1970.